DEL ROSARIO: New rules will harm sports, athletes

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It’s the beginning of the formation of superteams in California high school athletics. The California Interscholastic Federation’s majority decision to allow student-athletes to transfer to high schools for athletically-motivated purposes is a recipe for disaster.

Transfer athletes no longer have to lie about their home addresses or about their reasons for transferring schools. They are free to go wherever they desire for whatever reasons they want.
Because of this, the top athletes of each sport from each school will all transfer to the biggest powerhouse of their respective sport. For example, all of the top local basketball prospects will go to Woodcreek or Sheldon High School. For football, all of the top players will transfer to Del Oro.

This will eventually lead to one dominant team surrounded by mediocre teams in every league in California. For years and years, the best team will excel while the average teams will suffer even more than they already do against current powerhouse teams.

Not only will the rule worsen competition; it will also ruin athlete’s’ chance of becoming great.

Coaches at certain schools will have to make tough decisions regarding playing time because they will have so many talented players.

A player that could be the go-to star at one school could become a team’s bench warmer because of a simple transfer. This change limits potential Division I athletes to inferiority. Racking up a roster of star athletes will ruin the futures ahead of these young men and women.

This goes hand in hand with another problem: dissatisfaction of parents. What’s going to happen when someone’s talented child sits out the whole game? Nothing good.

The relationship between parents and schools (especially coaches) will worsen every year. Coaches will begin to get bad reputations for benching star players. The bitterness that will be expressed by parents will create an unhealthy relationship between them and schools.

It’s a terrible move for high school athletics. It’s a terrible movement that we also see in professional sports, and people hate it. I don’t see this move turning out any differently, so people can say goodbye to fair competition and enjoyment in California high school sports.